Taking care to tread quietly, Ezri entered the quarters she shared with Julian. She wanted to look in on him once more before preparing for the tactical briefing.

“Hello, Julian.”

He was sitting cross-legged on the bunk, his usually immaculate hair disheveled, his uniform jacket torn and askew, his eyes closed as though he had been deep in meditation. When they opened, she saw a momentary whirlpool of confusion in their brown depths.

Then he smiled at her.

She smiled back, relieved. She hadn’t startled him this time. And he wasn’t throwing things. Or screaming.

“You’re quite pretty,” he said, his voice sounding like a kilometer of gravel-strewn road. Her smile wavered as she looked into his eyes. Did he even recognize her?

Her gaze was drawn to the uneven lettering that Julian had evidently burned into the bulkhead during one of her absences. Beside a few archaic Terran words was scrawled Voice and nothing more.

Was that how Julian saw himself during his lucid moments? Ezri found the idea difficult to understand. She had come to believe in his steady judgment, his rock-solid humanity, the way a mathematician accepts a geometrical axiom. She found the phrase Julian had carved to be a far better description of herself. Nothing but appearances, she thought. Pips on a uniform that’s no longer even the right color.

She recalled her counseling training. “Impostor syndrome” was how the texts had described the feelings she was having. The irrational conviction that one’s continued presence in a given job is somehow fraudulent. What frightened Ezri most about the notion was that it felt completely rational.

Because she knew it was the truth.

It was then that she noticed the laser scalpel on the beside table. The instrument lay discarded, apparently forgotten, atop a battered copy of a book titled Alice in Wonderland, a favorite from Julian’s childhood. Ezri noticed then that the scalpel was still lit up and active. Not good. She realized that he must be stashing away some of his instruments. Or perhaps her own shortcomings had prevented her from finding and removing all the dangerous objects that were already in their quarters.

Some exec I am. I can’t even keep the sharp objects away from the man I love.

Carefully meeting Julian’s curiously childlike gaze, Ezri sat on the bunk beside him. Without calling attention to the gesture, she carefully picked up the scalpel and shut it off with a quiet flick of her thumb. She also took the dermal regenerator.

He noticed. “Those’re mine,” he said, scowling, his eyes hawklike.

Careful, she told herself. The last thing she wanted was to provoke him into another frustrated tantrum. She didn’t want to be forced to have him sedated. What would be left of him after he woke up?

“It’s all right, Julian,” she said, trying to keep her tone pleasant without offering any condescension—that would be a sure way of setting him off. “You weren’t planning on doing any surgery anytime soon, were you?”

Only then did she notice the small teddy bear that lay partially concealed by the chaotic bedclothes. The threadbare animal was missing an eye. She recognized Kukalaka, Julian’s childhood teddy bear, which she had once been amused to discover that he still owned. Until now she hadn’t realized that he had brought it along with him to the Gamma Quadrant.

Then she saw the crazy quilt of razor-thin, intersecting lines across the stuffed creature’s abdomen. Obviously Julian had been using Kukalaka to practice whatever surgical skills he could still remember.

His eyes narrowed. “I’m a doctor. I need my instruments.”

Julian’s manner made her think of her brother Norvo. When they were little, he had announced that he was a dilithium miner. Norvo’s face had had that same earnest expression.

“Yes, Julian. But doctors keep their instruments in the medical bay.” She tucked the tools into a pouch on her jacket. “I’ll take these there for you, while you stay here and get some rest.”

“I don’t need to rest.” He pushed himself off the bed, reaching his feet with a stumble she’d never seen before. “I have to go to the medical bay, too.”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea, Julian.”

He elbowed his way toward the door. In the room’s tight confines, it was difficult to stay out of his way.

“There’s a patient I need to see.” The door whooshed open as he approached it. He made a dismissive gesture toward Kukalaka, who still lay on the bed. “A real patient. There’s some…therapy I need to administer.”

Sacagawea, she thought. He was talking about their D’Naali guide.

“Julian, you need to stay here. You’re in no condition to care for a patient. Besides, Ensign Richter and Ensign Juarez can give the alien whatever therapy he might need.”

He regarded her in silence for a lengthy moment, apparently about to explode in an emotional outburst. But when he finally spoke, his voice was surprisingly calm and gentle.

“You don’t understand, Ezri. The therapy isn’t for my patient. It’s for me.”

Ezri suddenly understood something: Whatever skills the artifact had taken from Julian, his courage and determination—his emotional intelligence—still remained with him, at least in some measure. And she knew that now wasn’t the time to hide—or to surrender. Not while the alien artifact still held onto its secrets.

All he seemed to be asking for was some simple dignity. Maybe, she thought, that’s the only thing nobody can ever truly take from any of us.

Tears stung her eyes as she forced aside all thought of her own loss. Simultaneously galvanized and shamed by Julian’s courage, she arrived at a command decision.

“Let me walk with you to the medical bay, Julian.” A moment later, they were moving together down the corridor.

And for at least a few fleeting minutes she felt far less like an impostor. She wished she could believe that the feeling would last.

Right ahead of Shar, Nog stepped onto the bridge. He relished the solid feel of his left leg as he put his weight on it. The new limb seemed every bit as strong as the other one. Don’t get too attached to it, he reminded himself, then nearly laughed aloud at the absurdity of the notion.

Seated at the ops console, Ensign Tenmei glanced over her shoulder, acknowledging Nog and Shar with a smile and a nod. Commander Vaughn swiveled the command chair in their direction, an expectant expression on his face.

“Have you found a way around the blockade problem yet?”

Nog shook his head, feeling somewhat disappointed with himself. “Not quite, sir. We’re still working on that.”

“We did make another discovery, Captain,” Shar said. “And we thought it best to bring it to your attention immediately. It concerns the alien text.”

Vaughn’s eyebrows rose. “You’ve translated it.”

“Partially,” Shar said, nodding. “I believe we’ve uncovered some of the artifact’s history, or at least some sort of…origin myth.”

“Go on,” Vaughn said, stroking his silver beard thoughtfully.

“Apparently the Oort cloud artifact was once located on the surface of an inhabited planet,” Shar said.

Bowers approached from the tactical station, his curiosity obviously piqued. “And where is this planet now?”

“Lots of places, as far as we can tell,” Nog said. “And in lots of little pieces.”

“The artifact’s world of origin was apparently destroyed aeons ago,” Shar said, “in some great, planetary-scale cataclysm.”

“Caused by what?” Vaughn wanted to know.

“We think by the artifact itself,” said Nog. “Whatever the artifact did released enough energy to send it way out here, to the outskirts of the system.”

Vaughn gestured toward the main viewer, which continuously displayed the object’s eternal tumble. “It’s powerful enough to destroy an entire planet?”

“I don’t think there’s much that’s beyond its capabilities,” Shar said. “The text mentions a progenitor species, perhaps ancestral to both the D’Naali and the Nyazen, who constructed the artifact to ‘reap the bounty of the many unseen realms.’”

Bowers frowned. “‘Unseen realms’?”

“Parallel universes, perhaps,” Vaughn said. “Maybe it’s some kind of interdimensional power collector.”

“That’s our best guess,” Nog said. “We think it was designed to draw energy out of higher-dimensional spaces and the parallel universes adjacent to our own.”

Bowers looked impressed. “I guess that would explain why parts of the thing are always bobbing in and out of normal space.”

“And it might also explain,” Tenmei said, “the weird quantum resonance patterns the Sagan’ s been giving off. The shuttle must be carrying the fingerprints of some of those other universes.”

Shar nodded, his expression dour. “And if the artifact is some sort of energy collection device, that might also account for the power-draining effect it had on the Sagan.”

“So what do you suppose happened to the people who built this thing?” Vaughn asked, his eyes riveted to the artifact on the screen.

Bowers’s brow wrinkled in thought. “And how did they manage to incorporate stuff into this text about what happened after their homeworld got blown to kingdom come?”

“That’s been bothering me, too,” Nog said. “From these translated fragments, it looks as though a number of people were aboard the artifact during the disaster. A few survivors evidently amended the text.”

Shar glanced at his padd before weighing in on the matter. “Those survivors may have persisted for many generations, and might even be the remote ancestors of the D’Naali, the Nyazen, or both. Whatever really happened is shrouded in mythological language, so it’s hard to be certain. But it appears that the attempt these beings made to mine the adjacent dimensions unleashed forces that literally ripped their homeworld apart.”

“And the artifact itself survived because it was in the eye of the storm,” Vaughn said.

Shar nodded. “Exactly.”

“And the forces that destroyed the planet flung the object way out here,” Nog said. The image of the powerful artifact caroming off billions of frozen planetesimals and icy Oort cloud fragments brought to mind a complicated bank shot on some cosmic dom-jot table.

Vaughn rose from the command chair. “Good work, gentlemen. Mr. Bowers, you have the bridge. Mr. Nog, I want you and your people to keep searching for a way around that blockade.”

“Aye, sir,” Nog found himself suppressing a sudden urge to smile. For some reason he couldn’t quite articulate, he felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough. But he knew that a good engineer didn’t discuss such things with his captain until after he’d taken the time to test them.

“Shar, I want you to come with me,” Vaughn said on his way to the turbolift.

Shar’s antennae rose in evident curiosity as he fell into step beside Vaughn. “Sir?”

“I want to know whether Sacagawea can shed some light on your translations,” Vaughn said, throwing a backward glance toward the image of the artifact. “Maybe he can even help us use it to get inside that thing.”

Striding into the medical bay a few paces ahead of Shar, Vaughn found the tableau that greeted him almost too painful to look at.

Julian Bashir was a mere shadow of himself, his hair mussed and beard stubble darkening his face. The doctor’s dark eyes resembled those of a frightened child. In spite of it all, he persevered through what appeared to be an attempt to examine his D’Naali patient, who sat impassively on one of the biobeds. Ezri and Ensign Richter hovered close by, their faces masks of pained sympathy as the doctor moved haltingly, waving a medical tricorder before Sacagawea.

“You’ve taken good care of him, Julian,” Ezri said, sounding awkward. “He seems…quite healthy now.”

Vaughn cleared his throat, immediately drawing the attention of Ezri and Richter. “I’d like to speak to our guest for a moment.”

Bashir turned toward Vaughn, staring at him without any apparent recognition. Vaughn found the idea of such a loss of self chilling in the extreme. Being over a century old, he sometimes wondered if senility would one day overcome him in much the same manner. It was difficult to imagine any worse fate.

“With your permission of course, Doctor,” Vaughn said, keeping his eyes on Bashir rather than on either of the two women. Regardless of his current condition, this was still Bashir’s medical bay; Vaughn wanted to be as solicitous of the doctor’s dignity as possible, without drifting into condescension.

Quietly lowering his tricorder, Bashir nodded.

Vaughn approached the tall, willowy alien, who regarded him with unfathomable, fist-sized eyes. Shar looked on quietly, evidently content to observe.

“We need your assistance,” Vaughn said.

As though mounted on gimbals, the alien’s head swiveled closer to Vaughn. “Debt/obligation I have,” it said, the universal translator rendering the words in incongruous bell peals. “With delight do I discharge same. What need/desire have you?”

“Your adversaries are preventing us from getting close to the…cathedral. We must find a way around that difficulty.”

The creature’s mouth parts moved laterally in what Vaughn thought might have been a smile. “Understand. You need/require interior access to the cathedral/ anathema.”

So far, Vaughn had had no luck in getting Sacagawea to explain why his people and the Nyazen were such bitter enemies. The creature either did not understand or was deliberately holding something back. Vaughn hoped he would make better progress pumping the alien for information about the artifact itself.

“Yes,” Vaughn said.

Sacagawea pointed a long, branchlike finger toward Bashir first, then Ezri. “Access you desire/require because of this pair. Touched by the cathedral/anathema have they been both. Misaligned in their worldlines are they both as consequence/result. And both deteriorating/worsening steadily, per timeunit.”

Remarkable, Vaughn thought as he parsed the alien’s tortuous locutions. Ezri and Richter both stood by, saucer-eyed.

“How could it know that Julian and Ezri have been altered by their contact with the artifact?” Shar said, sounding nonplussed.

His own curiosity already moving at high warp, Vaughn wanted that question answered as well. But he also felt an irresistible desire to learn more about the artifact itself.

“The cathedral has a special meaning for your people, doesn’t it?” Vaughn said. “And for the Nyazen as well.”

“Source of all things is cathedral/anathema. Feared/ revered by all D’Naali. Feared/revered by all Nyazen. But Nyazen wish exclusion. Desire/require cathedral/ anathema for Nyazen only. This exclusion D’Naali cannot countenance/abide.”

“Does anybody in the Gamma Quadrant know how to share?” Ezri said with a smile fit for the gallows.

Before Vaughn could respond, the medical bay’s door slid open and Nog bounded into the room, his excitement palpable.

“Lieutenant?” Vaughn said.

“Sorry, sir. I hope I’m not interrupting anything critical.”

“Never mind that. What’s on your mind?”

Nog grinned. “I think I’ve finally found a way to get us around the Nyazen blockade.”

Cutting off Vaughn’s response, Sacagawea suddenly turned toward Nog. “Touched by the cathedral/anathema is this one as well. Worldlines as misaligned as the others.”

Vaughn felt a serpent of apprehension beginning to turn in his gut. This creature had somehow identified everyone affected by the artifact, apparently by sight alone. “Nog,” Vaughn said, “when you interviewed Sacagawea about the artifact earlier, did you tell him who had been aboard the Sagan during the survey mission?”

“Not exactly, sir,” Nog said, looking embarrassed. “I mean, I did tell him that I was aboard, and that I wasn’t alone. But I didn’t tell him who was with me specifically.”

“And what did he tell you?” Vaughn said.

“Not much that made sense. Mainly that everyone who was ‘afflicted’ had to go aboard the artifact together.”

Vaughn turned his attention back to Sacagawea. “What do you mean by ‘misaligned worldlines’?” He noticed that Shar had opened up a tricorder and was waving it in the direction of Ezri and Julian.

“Misaligned,” Sacagawea said with what Vaughn thought sounded like a tinge of impatience. “Untethered. Adrift/lost midworlds. Is clear enough/sufficient, I judge.”

Taking a step backward toward Shar and Nog, Vaughn shook his head in frustration. The alien’s explanations were still about as clear as the Coal Sack Nebula.

Shar quickly scanned Nog, then shut the device down. “I think I understand at least part of what our guest is trying to tell us, Captain,” he said. “Those peculiar quantum resonance patterns that each member of the shuttle crew is exhibiting seem to be growing steadily more extreme hour by hour.”

Vaughn wasn’t sure, but he thought he liked Sacagawea’s explanation better. It, at least, had been somewhat poetic. “Explain.”

Shar adopted a polite, not quite pedantic lecture-hall tone. “When a person’s quantum resonance patterns drift far enough from normal, that person can become incompatible with the quantum signature of our universe. Imagine becoming ‘unmoored’ from our universe because of a quantum-level conflict. You would be hurled randomly into some alternate world.”

Vaughn recalled some of the mission files he had read during his brief time aboard the Enterprise shortly before coming to DS9. About six years ago, a member of Jean-Luc Picard’s crew had experienced something quite similar.

“Are the shuttle personnel showing any signs of…‘unmooring’ anytime soon?”

Shar sighed, obviously frustrated by his paucity of hard information. “Not that I can tell. But as the effect progresses, who knows?”

Vaughn glanced briefly at Nog, who was shifting his weight anxiously from his old foot to his new one. He was clearly not enjoying the discussion, and seemed to be avoiding looking directly at either Ezri or Bashir.

Vaughn turned back to Shar. “Maybe those quantum signature readings show that something else is going on. Instead of being sent to some parallel world, maybe everyone affected is gradually transforming into some alternate self. For instance, a Julian Bashir whose genes were never resequenced.” To Nog he said, “Like the one from the alternate universe that your father and uncle visited last year.”

Ezri was nodding. “Or an Ezri Tigan who never joined with Dax.”

“Or a Nog who listened to his uncle and went to business school instead of Starfleet Academy,” Nog said, regarding his left leg with a wistful expression.

Shar pursed his lips as he considered the idea. “I’ll grant that it’s possible. But given the increasing flux in the quantum resonance readings, I can’t rule out any sudden, permanent disappearances.”

Vaughn sighed. “Lovely.” Approaching Sacagawea again, he said, “How do we…realign these ‘worldlines’?”

“Ingress to the cathedral/anathema,” Sacagawea said. “Only inside may the four afflicted ones be resolved/restored. Only the four may enter. Others will be misaligned, ending badly.”

Four?

“Hold it,” Nog said, obviously having noticed the same discrepancy that had caught Vaughn’s attention. “There were only three people aboard the Sagan.”

Vaughn saw that Ezri was quietly shaking her head. She raised her hand and pointed across the room toward a gurney. On the gurney, the Dax symbiont’s nutrient tank sat, evidently in preparation for a medical examination.

Four afflicted ones, Vaughn thought, understanding.

“Oh,” Nog said.

“The four afflicted ones need/require ingress to cathedral/anathema,” Sacagawea said. “While time persists/endures/lasts.”

“Before it’s too late,” Vaughn whispered. Though he had nothing to go on other than the D’Naali’s words and his own growing conviction, he felt more certain than ever that the key to everything lay somewhere within the artifact’s enigmatic depths.

It’s either there or nowhere.

“Okay,” Ezri said. “Now we just have to get around that blockade.”

“Option nonexistent,” Sacagawea agreed, “to battle/ weapons discharge.”

He’s saying we have no alternative other than to fight. Vaughn was beginning to feel boxed in by circumstances. But he remained determined. A viable win-win scenario had to exist. He simply hadn’t found it yet.

“Fighting’s not our best option,” he said at length. “Not with so many Nyazen tubes aimed right down our throats.”

“Even if we could fight our way through the blockade,” Ezri said, “what right would we have to do it? The Nyazen seem to be claiming the artifact, and they’ve already, ah, asked us to leave in no uncertain terms.”

“That’s not precisely how I see it, Lieutenant,” Vaughn said, gently brushing her objection aside. “The jurisdictional issues seem to be in dispute here, at least from the D’Naali perspective. And since both the D’Naali and the Nyazen are spacefaring species, the Prime Directive doesn’t apply.”

Which means it falls to me to cut the Gordian knot.

“So what are you going to do?” Ezri said.

Vaughn knew without looking that everyone’s eyes were upon him. He chose his words with great care before beginning to speak. “If I have to, I’ll fight my way out of this and sort it all out with Starfleet later. But only after I’ve tried every other alternative.”

Ezri and Ensign Richter both appeared relieved. Sacagawea was, as usual, unreadable, though Vaughn assumed that the alien was listening with a great deal more attentiveness than was apparent. Bashir merely looked bewildered, though he was clearly trying to appear brave—perhaps for Ezri’s benefit.

Nog seemed fairly beside himself with the need to say something.

“I am not eager to belabor this point, Captain,” Shar said, his features drawn and solemn. “But our alternatives are fairly limited. Fighting may become inevitable.”

A brilliant, snaggle-toothed grin spread across Nog’s face then. “Why fight over the front door,” he said, “when you can just…sneak in through the back?”

Vaughn returned the grin as all heads, including Sacagawea’s, turned expectantly toward the chief engineer.